Week 29: Newsworthy--a Tragic Accident

My newsworthy ancestors seem mostly to have lived several centuries ago.  More recently newsworthy ancestors and family members are just too sad to go into.  This one may be distant enough to be less sad, and besides, I cannot find the original story online.   This is more in the line of memoir and I cannot guarantee the facts.

I was probably about 12 when I was browsing through my grandmother Belknap's family Bible (I'm really hoping one of the cousins has this Bible!).  I don't remember everything I found in it, probably some pressed flowers at least, but it did have a clipping describing the accident that had killed my grandfather, Melvin Dwight Belknap in 1936.  Since this was a sawmill accident in Malone, Washington in 1936, it was quite gruesome.  The description, in my memory, was a lot more detailed than you would find in a modern news story, and it was quite, uh, graphic.  I will only say that it did not involve any saws but it was definitely going to be fatal.

My grandmother lived another 33 years following the death of her husband.  She was one of the earliest claimants of benefits from the Workmen's Compensation program of the state of Washington:  my summer job in the mid-1970s  was as a clerk-typist for that office and I've always kicked myself that my 19 year old self did not explore the archives when she had the chance!  I believe that Grandma Belknap received monthly checks from Workmen's Comp until her own death in 1969.  (The alternative was a one-time payout which was certainly an option by the 1970s but I don't know that it would have been available to her in the late 1930s).

Melvin and Grace Belknap, 1916, Olympia, Washington